SMALL companies hit by flooding and other natural disasters in future will have help to get back to trading quickly from a new £1.5m fund.
The cash from One North East will help cover the costs of immediate recovery needs – including insurance excess, buying essential equipment for trade, and clean-up work.
The support is the latest addition to a suite of funding from the development agency to help firms hit by natural disasters and the credit crunch:
A £10m credit crunch support package to top up grant aid available to firms, help companies with tax and credit problems, widen access to finance and advise on cutting fuel bills;
£500,000 of rapid response finance to assist firms hit by the recent North East floods;
Financial aid to help farmers remove dead sheep from flooded land;
Other packages are being drawn up to extend support to other hard-pressed businesses in coming weeks.
The new £1.5m fund to help firms cope after future natural disasters is the first of its kind in the region.
One North East’s director of business and industry Ian Williams said: “The sad reality is that we are likely to see more incidents of flooding in the future.
“These natural disasters can be devastating for small businesses as insurance claims can take months to be processed, excesses may be prohibitively high and policies may not cover some of the immediate costs of getting back up and running. This extra funding will help to ease some of those immediate pressures, enabling small firms to get back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible in the event of more incidents like we’ve seen this year.”
In Morpeth, more than £100,000 of the rapid recovery finance has so far been awarded to help 54 businesses with recovery costs.
Christine Hardy received a grant of £2,500 to help clean up her tearoom, replace damaged items and cover staff wages while the work was completed.
She said: “The support has really helped us out. We are a small family business and the flood closed us down. Now we can see a future again and we are very grateful for this support. I am very impressed by the speed with which the support agencies have responded.”
As with the Morpeth rapid response finance, the funding will be managed by the North East England Investment Centre (NEEIC), reached via Business Link. Alastair MacColl, chief executive of Business & Enterprise North East which provides Business Link and NEEIC services, said: “While small businesses can’t be certain of exactly when a natural disaster will affect them, they can now at least be reassured that there will be help available for them quickly in such circumstances.
“Business Link works closely with One North East to ensure that our region’s business community is well positioned to deal with any external challenges that it might face. This new fund is a welcome addition to the wide-ranging business support – financial and otherwise – that already exists in North East England.”
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